The Love Object (3 page)

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said.

‘Did you set it?’ I said, indignant. There was an element of betrayal here as if he’d wanted to sneak away without saying good-bye.’

‘I must have,’ he said. He put his arm around me and we lay back again. It was dark outside and there was a feeling – though this may be memory feeling – of frost.

‘Congratulations, you’re getting your prize today,’ he whispered. I was being given an award for my announcing. I am a television announcer.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I was ashamed of it. It reminded me of being back at school and always coming first in everything and being guilty about this, but not disciplined enough to deliberately hold back.

‘It’s beautiful that you stayed all night,’ I said. I was stroking him all over. My hands were never still in bed. Awake or asleep I constantly caressed him. Not to excite him, simply to reassure and comfort him and perhaps to consolidate my ownership. There is something about holding on to things that I find therapeutic. For hours I hold smooth stones in the palm of my hand or I grip the sides of an armchair and feel the better for it. He kissed me. He said he had never known anyone so sweet or so attentive. Encouraged I began to do something very intimate. I heard his sighs of pleasure, the ‘oy, oy’ of delight when he was both indulging it and telling himself that he mustn’t. At first I was unaware of his speaking voice.

‘Hey,’ he said, jocularly, just like that. ‘This can’t go on, you know.’ I thought he was referring to our activity at that moment because of course it was late and he would have to get up shortly. Then I raised my head from its sunken position between his legs and I looked at him through my hair which had fallen over my face. I saw that he was serious.

‘It just occurred to me that possibly you love me,’ he said. I nodded and pushed my hair back so that he would read it, my testimony, clear and clean upon my face. He put me lying down so that our heads were side by side and he began:

‘I adore you, but I’m not in love with you, with my commitments I don’t think I could be in love with anyone, it all started gay and light-hearted …’ Those last few words offended me. It was not how I saw it or how I remembered it: the numerous telegrams he sent me saying, ‘I long to see you’, or, ‘May the sun shine on you’, the first few moments each time when we met and were overcome with passion, shyness and the shock of being so disturbed by each other’s presence. We had even searched in our dictionaries for words to convey the specialness of our regard for each other. He came up with ‘cense’ which meant to adore or cover with the perfume of love. It was a most appropriate word and we used it over and over again. Now he was negating all this. He was talking about weaving me into his life, his family life … becoming a friend. He said it, though, without conviction. I could not think of a single thing to say. I knew that if I spoke I would be pathetic, so I remained silent. When he’d finished I stared straight ahead at the split between the curtains, and looking at the beam of raw light coming through I said, ‘I think there’s frost outside,’ and he said that possibly there was, because winter was upon us. We got up and as usual he took the bulb out of the bedside lamp and plugged in his razor. I went off to get breakfast. That was the only morning I forgot about squeezing orange juice for him and I often wonder if he took it as an insult. He left just before nine.

The sitting-room held the traces of his visit. Or, to be precise, the remains of his cigars. In one of the blue, saucer-shaped ashtrays there were thick turds of dark-grey cigar ash. There were also stubs but it was the ash I kept looking at, thinking that its thickness resembled the thickness of his unlovely legs. And once again I experienced hatred for him. I was about to tip the contents of the ashtray into the fire-grate when something stopped me, and what did I do but get an empty lozenge box and with the aid of a sheet of paper lift the clumps of ash in there and carry the tin upstairs. With the movement the turds lost their shapes, and whereas they had reminded me of his legs they were now an even mass of dark-grey ash, probably like the ashes of the dead. I put the tin in a drawer underneath some clothes.

Later in the day I was given my award – a very big silver medallion with my name on it. At the party afterwards I got drunk. My friends tell me that I did not actually disgrace myself but I have a humiliating recollection of beginning a story and not being able to go ahead with it, not because the contents eluded me but because the words became too difficult to pronounce. A man brought me home and after I’d made him a cup of tea I said good night over-properly, then when he was gone I staggered to my bed. When I drink heavily I sleep badly. Wakening, it was still dark outside and straight away I remembered the previous morning, and the suggestion of frost outside, and his cold warning words. I had to agree. Although our meetings were perfect I had a sense of doom impending, of a chasm opening up between us, of someone telling his wife, of souring love, of destruction. And still we hadn’t gone as far as we should have gone. There were peaks of joy and of its opposite that we should have climbed to, but the time was not left to us. He had of course said, ‘You still have a great physical hold over me,’ and that in its way I found degrading. To have gone on making love when he had discarded me would have been repellent. It had come to an end. The thing I kept thinking of was a violet in a wood and how a time comes for it to drop off and die. The frost may have had something to do with my thinking, or rather with my musing. I got up and put on a dressing-gown. My head hurt from the hangover but I knew that I must write to him while I had some resolution. I know my own failings and I knew that before the day was out I would want to re-see him, sit with him, coax him back with sweetness and my overwhelming helplessness.

I wrote the note and left out the bit about the violet. It is not a thing you can put down on paper without seeming fanciful. I said if he didn’t think it prudent to see me, then not to see me. I said it had been a nice interlude and that we must entertain good memories of it. It was a remarkably controlled letter. He wrote back promptly. My decision came as a shock he said. Still he admitted that I was right. In the middle of the letter he said he must penetrate my composure and to do so he must admit that above and beyond everything he loved me and would always do so. That of course was the word I had been snooping around for, for months. It set me off. I wrote a long letter back to him. I lost my head. I over-said everything. I testified to loving him, to sitting on the edge of madness in the intervening days, to my hoping for a miracle.

It is just as well that I did not write out the miracle in detail because possibly it is, or was, rather inhuman. It concerned his family.

He was returning from the funeral of his wife and children, wearing black tails. He also wore the white silk scarf I had seen him with, and there was a black, mourning tulip in his buttonhole. When he came towards me I snatched the black tulip, and replaced it with a white narcissus, and he in turn put the scarf around my neck and drew me towards him by holding its fringed ends. I kept moving my neck back and forth within the embrace of the scarf. Then we danced divinely on a wooden floor that was white and slippery. At times I thought we would fall but he said, ‘You don’t have to worry. I’m with you.’ The dance floor was also a road and we were going somewhere beautiful.

For weeks I waited for a reply to my letter but there was none. More than once I had my hand on the telephone, but something cautionary – a new sensation for me – in the back of my mind bade me to wait. To give him time. To let regret take charge of his heart. To let him come of his own accord. And then I panicked. I thought that perhaps the letter had gone astray or had fallen into other hands. I’d posted it of course to the office in Lincoln’s Inn where he worked. I wrote another. This time it was a formal note, and with it I enclosed a postcard with the words
YES
and
NO
. I asked if he had received my previous letter to kindly let me know by simply crossing out the word which did not apply on my card, and send it back to me. It came back with the
NO
crossed out. Nothing else. So he had received my letter. I think I looked at the card for hours. I could not stop shaking and to calm myself I took several drinks. There was something so brutal about the card, but then you could say that I had asked for it by approaching the situation in that way. I took out the box with his ash in it and wept over it, and both wanted to toss it out of the window and preserve it for evermore.

In general I behaved very strangely. I rang someone who knew him and asked for no reason at all what she thought his hobbies might be. She said he played the harmonium which I found unbearable news altogether. Then I entered a black patch and on the third day I lost control.

Well, from not sleeping and taking pep pills and whisky I got very odd. I was shaking all over and breathing very quickly the way one might after witnessing an accident. I stood at my bedroom window which is on the second floor and looked at the concrete underneath. The only flowers left in bloom were the hydrangeas, and they had faded to a soft russet which was much more fetching than the harsh pink they were all summer. In the garden next door there were frost hats over the fuchsias. Looking first at the hydrangeas, then at the fuchsias, I tried to estimate the consequences of my jumping. I wondered if the drop were great enough. Being physically awkward I could only conceive of injuring myself fatally, which would be worse because I would then be confined to my bed and imprisoned with the very thoughts that were driving me to desperation. I opened the window and leaned out, but quickly drew back. I had a better idea. There was a plumber downstairs installing central heating – an enterprise I had embarked upon when my lover began to come regularly and we liked walking around naked eating sandwiches and playing records. I decided to gas myself and to seek the help of the plumber in order to do it efficiently. I am aware – someone must have told me – that there comes a point in the middle of the operation when the doer regrets it and tries to withdraw, but cannot. That seemed like an extra note of tragedy that I had no wish to experience. So, I decided to go downstairs to this man and explain to him that I
wanted
to die, and that I was not telling him simply for him to prevent me, or console me, that I was not looking for pity – there comes a time when pity is of no help – and that I simply wanted his assistance. He could show me what to do, settle me down, and – this is absurd – be around to take care of the telephone and the doorbell for the next few hours. Also to dispose of me with dignity. Above all I wanted that. I even decided what I would wear: a long dress, which in fact was the same colour as the hydrangeas in their russet phase and which I’ve never worn except for a photograph or on television. Before going downstairs, I wrote a note which simply said: ‘I am committing suicide through lack of intelligence, and through not knowing, not learning to know, how to live.’

You will think I am callous not to have taken the existence of my children into account. But, in fact, I did. Long before the affair began I had reached the conclusion that they had been parted from me irrevocably by being sent to boarding-school. If you like, I felt I had let them down years before. I thought – it was an unhysterical admission – that my being alive or my being dead made little difference to the course of their lives. I ought to say that I had not seen them for a month, and it is a shocking fact that although absence does not make love less it cools down our physical need for the ones we love. They were due home for their mid-term holiday that very day, but since it was their father’s turn to have them, I knew that I would only see them for a few hours one afternoon. And in my despondent state that seemed worse than not seeing them at all.

Well of course when I went downstairs the plumber took one look at me and said, ‘You could do with a cup of tea.’ He actually had tea made. So I took it and stood there warming my child-sized hands around the barrel of the brown mug. Suddenly, swiftly, I remembered my lover measuring our hands when we were lying in bed and saying that mine were no bigger than his daughter’s. And then I had another and less edifying memory about hands. It was the time we met when he was visibly distressed because he’d caught those same daughter’s hands in a motor-car door. The fingers had not been broken but were badly bruised, and he felt awful about it and hoped his daughter would forgive him. Upon being told the story I bolted off into an anecdote about almost losing
my
fingers in the door of a new Jaguar I had bought. It was pointless, although a listener might infer from it that I was a boastful and heartless girl. I would have been sorry for any child whose fingers were caught in a motor-car door, but at that moment I was trying to recall him to the hidden world of him and me. Perhaps it was one of the things that made him like me less. Perhaps it was then he resolved to end the affair. I was about to say this to the plumber, to warn him about so-called love often hardening the heart, but like the violets it is something that can miss awfully, and when it does two people are mortally embarrassed. He’d put sugar in my tea and I found it sickly.

‘I want you to help me,’ I said.

‘Anything,’ he said. I ought to know that. We were friends. He would do the pipes tastefully. The pipes would be little works of art and the radiators painted to match the walls.

‘You may think I will paint these white, but in fact they will be light ivory,’ he said. The whitewash on the kitchen walls had yellowed a bit.

‘I want to do myself in,’ I said hurriedly.

‘Good God,’ he said, and then burst out laughing. He always knew I was dramatic. Then he looked at me and obviously my face was a revelation. For one thing I could not control my breathing. He put his arm around me and led me into the sitting-room and we had a drink. I knew he liked drink and thought, It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The maddening thing was that I kept thinking a live person’s thoughts. He said I had so much to live for. ‘A young girl like you – people wanting your autograph, a lovely new car,’ he said.